


just water dressed in brown

by Neffectual



Series: Decade & One [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Artist! Roxas, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-01-11 07:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neffectual/pseuds/Neffectual
Summary: Roxas is sure the redhead barista is a dickhead. He's also sure art school is a crock of shit. He doesn't think anything's really going to change his mind on either of those.





	1. art is why I get up in the morning

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter title from Ani DiFranco's "Out of Habit" which was played pretty much on repeat during this.

The red-headed barista is a fucking dick. Roxas decided this several months ago, when he sat sprawled out on a chair like he owned the place, a slice of skin showing between grey t-shirt and jeans that probably started off black, a while ago, with a plaid shirt draped over everything, and laughed when Roxas tripped over his own feet. His spiked hair cries out more for the emo kids of previous years than the man-bun hipsters who are most of the people surrounding Roxas when he staggers in for coffee, half-asleep and his own hair a mess of curl-like spikes because owning a brush is too fucking complicated for an 8am class. He’ll freely admit he’s a fucking poser, but the hair isn’t part of that, it just eats combs, and he’s given up fighting it.

Just like he’s given up fighting his fucking portfolio, canvas and paint and gesso combining to make something he hates, because it’s fucking soulless and dead inside. Art should be for art, not for some non-negotiable prompt from a fucking teacher who thinks that he needs to understand the Dutch masters before he should be allowed to pick up a brush. Fuck her – ground-breaking work is ground-breaking because it breaks rules no one even thought needed to be set in place, not because it broke the carefully-curated rules of art. There were fewer rules then, Roxas thinks, with a sneer. Art school isn't teaching him anything wikipedia couldn't, or even the fucking library, and Roxas isn't quite sure why he's bankrupting himself for the foreseeable future on it.

“Ah, it’s the painted prince,” the redhead says, with a grin, as Roxas shoves the door open, stupidly bulky portfolio folder catching on the doorframe as he rubs his eyes with his other hand. “The usual? Black coffee with enough sugar in it that the spoon stands up?”

“No one hired you to make commentary,” Roxas mutters, slumping against the counter.

“Yet another service this industry expects me to perform for free,” the redhead says, and that manages to lift the corner of Roxas’ mouth, as much as he hates himself for doing so. “So yes, the usual?”

“Yeah,” Roxas says, waiting for the transaction to show up before waving his phone idly in the right direction until something beeps. Then, he doesn’t know why he says it, but he does, “You ever think about how nothing we create can ever be fucking new anymore?”

The redhead has his back to him, but shrugs his shoulders.

“Thought they’d teach you the opposite in school?” he asks, and Roxas can hear the bitterness there, almost enough to wash away the sugar that’s being poured into his coffee. “It’s all just capitalism, dude.”

“You work in a coffee shop,” Roxas says, blankly.

“Existentialist communist philosophy doesn’t pay well these days,” the redhead says, offhand, setting his drink in front of him. “We’re all a small part of something bigger, even if we don’t want to be. You can’t always fight it.”

“Sure,” Roxas mutters, and leaves.

 

He thinks about it that night, struggling on another assignment, another place where he feels like a cog in some sort of art machine, painting the same sort of fucking still life that he’s been looking at since he was four, and hating since he was five. And modern art isn’t any better, making shit anyone could do and then saying it was impressive because it had some sort of title that suggested it was a think-piece, rather than pure art. When Roxas expresses this sentiment, people ask him what he wants, then, if he doesn’t think talent is important, but neither does he believe in message, and… he doesn’t have words for what he wants to do yet. Isn’t that what’s important? That he wants to make something special, something new, and he shouldn’t have words when the thing itself is beyond human consciousness?

He looks back at his acrylics, then to the paper, where a pear, a shoe, and a glass are represented by their own shadows, and fucking hates himself.

The coffee shop’s open when he goes in, and while it’s not a surprise to see someone other than the dickhead redhead, he is surprised to find he’s almost… disappointed? The girl behind the counter gives him a raised eyebrow from behind over-gelled spikes of blonde hair, and he suddenly finds that what he wants isn’t coffee, after all.

“The redhead, what’s his name?” he asks, and doesn’t flinch under her glare.

“You know how many creepers we get in here, demanding to know names and schedules and why the person who smiles at them every day doesn’t do it because they want to fuck them, but instead because capitalism demands that they’re nice or they lose their job?” she retorts, folding her arms.

“Does this place only hire philosophy students, or…?” he asks, and is relieved when she cracks a smile.

“Either that or retail really does help you see the worst in people,” she agrees, and makes him a coffee, hot and strong, and grimaces as he dumps sugar in it, spilling the grains across the counter she’s probably just cleaned. “Why’d you want to know about him, anyway?”

“I want to paint him,” Roxas says, even though he’d come over without any sort of plan to that end. “I’m studying art, not some creeper.”

“You realise saying that makes you sound even more creepy?” the blonde asks, but she shrugs. “Name’s Axel, normally does mornings, although fuck knows why, because he normally doesn’t sleep at night. Now will you get out of here so I can close? I’ve got half an hour of cleaning and cash drawer shit to do, fuck off, squirt.”

Roxas tells himself he leaves with dignity, and not at all like a shooed puppy.

 

The thing is, once he’s said out loud he wants to paint Axel, it’s all he can think of. It’s not progressive, it’s not exciting, it’s not new, but it’s what he wants to do. He misses home, he misses the friends he grew up with, even though they’re all at different schools now, and wouldn’t be home even if he went back. He misses his annoying little brother, and the dog, and the park where his parents had taken him to feed the ducks as a kid. He’s uncomfortable in this new space, tiny single room to himself, no roommate to befriend or fight with, and sometimes the silence is fucking deafening. He takes his meds, he checks in regularly, he makes sure he’s safe, but sometimes he feels like he could disappear completely and there’d be nothing of him left. He’d leave no mark on the planet, and he can’t cope with that – it’s one of the issues his therapist tried to work with, and it seemed to be okay when his goal was just getting through his last year of school and moving out, doing the art school thing… but now he’s here, there’s no purpose to anything he does.

But being annoyed at Axel, sniping at him, their little interactions – all of that makes him feel like someone sees him, like someone knows who he is right down to his very core, for the first time, and he doesn’t have any idea why.

He does, however, know that Axel is going to be totally impossible about being painted, about someone wanting to paint him, so it sort of surprises him when Axel greets him in the morning with a subdued approach.

“Hey, usual, right?” he says, and Roxas raises an eyebrow.

“Really?” he asks. “No smart remarks today? There’s blue paint in my hair, if you needed something to laugh at.”

Axel looks up for the first time.

“Figured you were making a bold new fashion choice,” he says, but there’s not the spark to it that there was before. “Look, Larxene said – “

“I promise, it’s just a colour theory thing,” Roxas blurts out, before Axel can say any more. “I – red, green, black, it’s interesting, is all. More interesting than working on an inverse sunset or whatever crap I’m expected to do.”

Axel does smile at that.

“She said some weirdo showed up, asked for my name, and then fucked off without giving his,” he says, with a hint of his usual teasing. “Is this one of those clothes off, money under the table things?”

“No, I – “ Roxas starts, before catching the glint in Axel’s eye. “Fuck you, you could’ve just said no.”

“I wasn’t saying no,” Axel says – and he isn’t.

 

Booking studio time is a fucking nightmare, and Roxas has never hated bureaucracy more than he does when he’s trying to wrangle a timetable, but eventually he gets a slot set up in the tiny studio everyone hates because it smells weird and was probably used to store brooms and mops before it was converted into yet more studio space. He doesn’t even know how he wants to paint Axel, just knows that he wants to think about darkness, negative space, the way colours blend together. There’s poor light in the room, so he’s lucky he didn’t want to think about sunlight on red hair and pale skin, or he’d be fucked.

Axel is surprisingly easy to paint, throwing his coat on top of Roxas’ own and lounging on the stool they have for models like – well, like he looked the first time Roxas saw him, like he owns the place. Like the space around him is suddenly so much less important, because he’s in the rest of it, and that’s where the eye needs to be drawn. Roxas does a couple of rough sketches, then decides he wants to throw himself straight in with paint, and gets to work.

For someone who can’t keep his mouth shut when he’s supposed to be serving coffee to sleep-deprived students, Axel’s pretty quiet when he’s the subject, shifting when Roxas asks, answering questions and changing poses, but he doesn’t start anything. He doesn’t snipe back. He doesn’t look alive, Roxas realises, and it’s coming through in everything he tries to do. Axel looks like the half-dead plants that fill art rooms everywhere, straining for every inch of light and space they can find before someone drags them off to be in a picture again, and never remember to water them.

“You okay?” Roxas asks, and finds himself, for once, genuinely caring what another human being is feeling. That’s a new one since he left for school, he hasn’t cared much about what people think since he said goodbye to Sora. “You’re kinda quiet.”

“Hm?” Axel says, then seems to rally himself. “Oh, just thinking, something you don’t know anything about – course, that’s why you’re an art student, right?”

Roxas throws a tube of paint at him – thankfully with the cap on tight – and Axel dodges, the first time he’s broken pose since they arrived.

“I’m about done,” Roxas says, while Axel’s still bright and alive and real, because it was weird to see him shut down like that. “You want to head out? I’ll finish up everything up, no need for you to hang around.”

“Okay,” Axel says, getting up and stretching, “Sure you don’t want a couple of nude poses? I know the best angles for that, if my grindr responses are anything to go by.” He’s smirking, and Roxas itches to fling paint at him again.

“I’d rather keep my vision, thanks,” he says, drily, and grins at Axel’s mock-huff. “See you in the morning, I guess.”

“I guess,” says Axel, grabbing his coat. “Just make sure you get my good side.”

“I’ll let you know if I find one!” Roxas calls, as Axel lets the studio door close behind him. Then he bends his head back to his work, and tries to find that spark in Axel, the one that only seems to be conjured up when he smiles.


	2. beautiful but boring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roxas can't paint the Axel he sees in his dreams. Why is this?

It doesn’t work. Roxas tries a dozen fucking things, painting Axel from memory over the next week, trying to conjure up the smile behind the counter when he shows up of a morning, trying to capture the chipping nail polish and the wry glint in green eyes and the weird tattoos or eyeliner he’s got under his eyes, but it doesn’t fucking work. Every time he takes his coffee from Axel’s hand, he’s got red paint on his hands, never quite the right shade for Axel’s hair, and he wonders if the redhead notices that he’s getting it wrong. Hell, at night he dreams in reds and greens and blacks, pressed against pale skin, and wakes scrabbling for the gouache, trying to draw the colours and contours out of the dream and into reality. And it never fucking works.

“You finished painting me yet?” Axel asks, one morning, with a teasing grin, and Roxas can’t even muster the energy to feed into that.

“No,” he says, flatly.

Axel doesn’t say anything, just looks at him with one eyebrow raised, and Roxas doesn’t want to hear what might come out of his mouth, so he speaks first.

“It’s not – nothing’s right, I can’t find the right angles, or the right… I don’t know. Everything I did in the studio was wrong, and it’s like I brought that wrong back with me. What did you do, sell your soul to make yourself impossible to paint?”

“Someone’s been reading his Wilde too much,” Axel says, but the spark has gone, and he’s flatter than he used to be, and Roxas has the horrible thought that it’s him, that he’s the one making Axel wrong like this, that he’s infected Axel with whatever intellectual malaise he’s been struggling through with stupid fucking art school, and he hates everything in the whole world that’s brought him to that moment, until Axel speaks again. “You know, you could always work from photos.”

Roxas pauses. Photos. Snapshots of colour, frozen and able to be edited in the mind before put to canvas – and what had Axel said before?

“Gotta go,” he says, grabbing his portfolio and sprinting out the door, realising only later that he left his coffee, untouched, on the counter. It would have been cold by the time he’d remembered it anyway.

 

Axel’s Grindr profile is a work of art. There’s only one picture with other people in it, and he’s edited that so you can only see the edges of blonde hair on one side and blue on the other, with the redhead front and centre grinning like he’s just walked out of hell with both Eurydice and Orpheus, and done it all while looking back, as well. The other pictures are – tasteful nudes would probably be the way to put it, in that sort of context, but Roxas has been looking at art for too long to be distracted from composition by the fact that a subject is naked. Skin is just skin, after all, everyone’s got it.

And Axel knows how to display himself to best effect, all long legs and sly eyes and slim torso. He must have got someone else to take the photos, there’s no way to arrange all those limbs like that without help, surely, and his arms aren’t in the right position to be using a selfie stick, aside from maybe one where he looks post-coitally flushed, hair splayed across the pillow beneath him. Roxas idly wonders if he’s got a tripod and was taking the shots remotely, or if he got a friend or an ex to take them, because they’re too composed. They almost look like professional glamour shots, but as those rarely have discarded pizza boxes and dirty laundry in them, Roxas dismisses that out of hand.

He does wonder if it’s okay to try and paint from these, though, and considers messaging Axel to ask if that’s okay. Then figures that’s probably creepier than just, y’know, going ahead and doing it. Axel’s already given his permission to be painted, and these pictures are out on the internet for anyone to see if they’re in the correct radius, so… fuck it. Roxas digs out the goache again, though he’s been trying acrylics to work with Axel’s sharp angles. Nudity and goache work better, and he’s never been that great with a proper watercolour paint. He sketches quick and dirty, preferring to go to paint as soon as possible, tracing the lines of Axel’s body with the brush, trying to capture the look in the redhead’s eyes, chasing that impossible expression that’s somehow both come-hither and mocking at the same time.

When it’s not even half-finished, he throws the brush across the room in disgust, hating himself a little more with everything he notices that’s so fucking wrong with it. He’s never had this sort of trouble with a subject before, he’s never struggled to actually paint what he wants, just to make it connect to something. He struggles with the rules, but this is painting within the rules, this is just trying to do the basics of capturing an image, and he hasn’t had difficulty with that since he was twelve, countless paintings prove that. But he can’t pin Axel down, and he fucking hates himself for it. This should be easy. This has always been easy. What is he getting wrong?

 

Roxas stops getting coffee in the mornings, makes instant at home before classes and then satiates his cravings on the way home instead, which means he gets Larxene, generally, who ignores him half the time and spends the other half looking at him like she’s something he wants to dissect. If it isn’t Larxene then it’s some massive bloke who barely makes conversation. Roxas doesn’t care, just cares that it’s not Axel, not the fucking symbol of his utter failure to paint anything worthwhile in the last month and a half. Sure, he’s painted for class, and he’s been getting good grades, but that’s not important, that’s never been important. What’s important is being able to do whatever he sets his mind to when it comes to art, and that’s been taken away.

“You know, he didn’t do anything wrong,” Larxene says one day, refusing to hand him his coffee until he looks up at her with a blank expression. “Axel, I mean. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Coffee, please,” Roxas says, because he doesn’t even want to think about Axel, about the arch of a brow and the curve of a grin and how he can see it all but never pin it down with paint or inks or charcoal – he’s tried every medium he could think of, even fucking chalk pastels, and he hates pastels – ever again.

She doesn’t hand over the cup, waiting.

“I just want my coffee,” Roxas says, again, and she sighs, looking at the line building up, and shoves it across the counter violently, cup falling over and slopping onto the surface and over the edge, onto Roxas’ shoes. “Hey! What the fuck?”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Larxene says, with her bored retail employee smile clearly masking something much sharper and more vicious. “You didn’t say where you wanted that coffee. I thought you meant you wanted it on the floor. Now excuse me, I’ve got other customers.”

She walks away, and Roxas just gapes after her, soggy sneakers on his feet. She doesn’t turn another look in his direction, dismissing him effectively, and in the end, he just stalks out, muttering under his breath about how some people need to be more grateful about the job they have, and hating himself for even thinking that. Axel would – it doesn’t matter what Axel would say in response, he tries to tell himself. It doesn’t help. That night, he dreams of red hair, and green eyes, and when he wakes, he doesn’t even try to paint what he saw. There isn’t any point.

 

Roxas has been moping for two months when he gets a piece of work back off a professor notoriously bad at returning work at all, never mind on time. It’s one of the first times he tried to paint Axel, sat on that stupid stool in the crappy studio with one knee up and the other foot on the floor, smile rueful and eyes down, not half as life-like as he always seems in Roxas’ dreams. The comment on the bottom of the picture – and that’s rude, too, what if Roxas had wanted to keep it pristine? – says all he needs to know about whether or not his inability to trap Axel on paper is showing.

“Beautiful, but boring.”

It’s right there in a pencil scrawl that Roxas has to squint to read, but it’s right there, and once he’s read it, it echoes in his head over and over, because… because it’s right. Because it’s absolutely right, and totally wrong all at the same time. Axel wasn’t beautiful, Roxas didn’t want to paint him because he was beautiful – did he? But that didn’t matter, because Axel wasn’t beautiful. He was all angles, edges, like he was made of a million little pixels, each sharp point of a corner showing in a smile, or a laugh, or his stupid fucking spiked hair.

But the thing Axel never was, the thing Roxas could never have accused him of being was, well, boring. He was never boring, never dull, that was the thing Roxas couldn’t pin down, just how alive Axel was. Roxas looks down at the painting, tears away the scrap where his teacher’s writing sits, and shoves the rest of it into the first trash can he sees. The slip of paper where that criticism sits, he carries that home, pinning it to the corkboard in his room, and staring at it. It’s a valid criticism, he can’t argue it. He just doesn’t know how to fix it.

And if his dreams, still, are full of red hair, green eyes, and long, long lines of pale skin, if his grindr search sometimes strays to Axel’s profile, if catching a flash of red out of the corner of his eye on the street still makes him turn around – there’s no one to tell. There’s no one to know.


End file.
